About this Event
We are thrilled to welcome regional writer Meghana Mysore to White Whale to celebrate her debut short story collection, Let All Our Ghosts Depart! National Book Award Winner Susan Choi describes the collectsion as "visionary stories [where] ex-lovers metamorphose into strangling scarves and three generations of women joyfully transform into rainbow-hued squirrels; the dead refuse their deaths even as the living have to fight to be alive. Every page offers something gorgeous, savage, and unexpected. Mysore is an extraordinary talent, and her work is unforgettable." Meghana Mysore will be joined in conversation by local author and educator, Anjali Sachdeva.
In Meghana Mysore's debut short story collection, present-day women and girls of the South Asian diaspora grapple with belonging and are haunted by intergenerational inheritances. Mysore, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, spins her stories around narrators struggling to assimilate into the surreal world around them. In the world of these stories, ghosts are real--in “Repair Shop,” dead mothers reappear as chiding, broken-down cars; in “Hoarder,” the narrator’s ex-lovers transform into scarves that won't let her go. In another story, a daughter, trapped inside her grief, spends her days Face Timing with her dead father, watching him become a young man she never knew.
At turns absurd and darkly humorous, and sometimes speculative, Mysore’s stories touch on real-life experiences of intergenerational trauma, womanhood, the fluidity of desire and longing, and coming home to one’s body. Her characters have faced violences small and large, holding losses that bind them to their pasts and weigh them down in daily life. Each of these stories contains an experience of transformation, be it small or monumental for these women, who find spaces of freedom and delight within their circumstances.
MEGHANA MYSORE'S stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Audacity, and more. She is the winner of the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. Mysore has been a Steinbeck Fellow and a scholar at McCormack Writing Center and Bread Loaf. She holds an MFA from Hollins University and a BA in English from Yale. Mysore has taught as visiting faculty at Amherst College and Bucknell University, and is now an assistant professor of English at Randolph College. From Portland, Oregon, Meghana is a daughter of Indian immigrants and a lover of non-sequiturs and used bookstores.
Event venue & nearby stays
White Whale Bookstore, 4754 Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.